


Stay

by dragon_rider



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-23 22:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragon_rider/pseuds/dragon_rider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To meet their worst nightmare head-on is something no human can go through without having a piece of them cut, crushed and swallowed by fear. Leonard tries to make himself whole again by listening to Jim’s steady heartbeat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt by [forthediehards](http://forthediehards.tumblr.com) on tumblr.
> 
> Possibly the sappiest thing I've ever written.
> 
> (English isn't my mother language, so I apologize for the mistakes in this)

Agony is the process that will inevitable be followed by death. It’s something no form of Medicine, archaic or modern, can hold back. As a doctor, Leonard has always refused to even think about the concept while his patients are alive on his table because it's the same as pronounce them dead. Sometimes it’s a struggle, his clinic eye is too well-trained, he’s learned to know the real signs of agony, to tell them apart from excruciating pain and weakening wounds and diseases.

This time isn’t a struggle. It’s denial, a voice deep inside his head whispers certain and vicious. It’s his rational voice and he’d do better listening to it, but he doesn’t want to. He barks orders to the away team around him instead, positions Jim in a way that will allow him to start with old-fashioned CPR as soon as it’s needed and has Spock checking the state of the transporters every five minutes, no matter how illogical Spock insists that is.

The natives took away his medkit and he’d give his right arm for a new one. Sure, he can tell Jim’s heartbeat is erratic and slow, he’s a damned doctor and knows how to take and feel a pulse after all, but with a tricorder in hand he’d be able to tell just how much his Captain  is going to endure before going into cardiac arrest.

Once it starts, it’s going to be five minutes and that’s pushing it. He knows it. Five minutes of asystole and he’ll have to call it, he’ll have to _admit_ it—he’ll have to deal with the fact Jim will be—and yet he can’t even _think_ of the word, he can’t—there has to be a way to save him and if there isn’t, then he’ll have to trust Jim’s mad, unruly lucky star to do it for him.

He stops feeling Jim’s carotid pulse before he notices the lack of breathing movements. It’s his call into action and he goes right to start the compressions and force air into Jim’s airways, but it’s almost a lost battle and he knows it, he _knows_.

Jim is getting colder by the second and Leonard has never hated time so much. If they’d found him just a little bit sooner, maybe he would’ve been able to stop the bleeding in time, to prevent Jim from going into hypovolemic shock but they didn’t and so, he couldn’t, and here he is, trying to infuse life into a body that already feels dead, that perhaps _is_ already dead but that he’s incapable of declaring as such.

He barely registers the familiar tingle of dematerialization and rematerialization on the transporter pad, all it tells his overloaded mind is to stop with the CPR and inject the epinephrine Chapel has at the ready.

They’re in Sickbay, God bless Scotty the miracle worker, and he’s quick if shaking in plugging Jim onto every device that could save his life which aren’t all that many at this point.

He waits seconds he can’t count before shouting for another syringe. His Head Nurse hands it without delay but frowns when he asks for a third one, reluctantly giving in to his request as they wait for the blood transfusions and positive inotropic agent to start working, if they’re ever going to.

Nothing changes. He still refuses to call it, has lost count of the minutes since Jim’s heart stopped beating, has lost count since the silence started. He grips a scalpel Chapel couldn’t get out of his reach fast enough and is about to rip Jim’s chest open in half to massage his heart back into life when the beeping sound of the bio-bed’s monitors informs him they haven’t lost Jim, not yet, and he barely allows himself time to feel slightly relieved before asking for the sterile field on the bed and shoving a pair of gloves on his hands after checking the respirator is doing its job and saving Jim from the effort of having to breathe on his own.

The surgery doesn’t take long. It wasn’t that big of a wound, not really, they were just too late in rescuing Jim and the sympathetic, unreasonable side of him is already hurting with the knowledge, his imagination wild when it comes to picture his most important person bleeding out and alone in an alien cell, far away from the ship he calls home and the crew he cares as family.

He’s every bit as exhausted as everyone else after the ordeal and even more, if he’s completely honest with himself, but no one gets him to move from Jim’s side where he’s been planted ever since it all started. Even Uhura offers to stay and let him know as soon as Jim is conscious again and Leonard has the optimistic readings of all his equipment to calm him down about possible brain damage, but he can’t be sure until Jim wakes up and he won’t waste a minute resting if he can be here instead, gently stroking each pulse point not hidden by covers—Jim’s wrists, the sides of his neck, his temples. They’re still weak, his peripheral pulses, but Jim is young and strong and he’ll recover from this, Leonard wants to convince himself of it now that they’re where they’re supposed to be and he can get Jim anything he needs as soon as he needs it.

Jim was never agonizing but a part of him can’t forget just how close he looked to it, how close Jim was to dying, how close _he_ was to lose everything, to lose the very reason he’s living in the middle of space for.

He doesn’t count the hours until Jim regains some semblance of consciousness, but he may as well have if he measures it in the steady tempo of the heartbeat beneath his ear and his fingers.

Sky blue eyes try hard to stay focused on him and for a moment, they do. For a moment, Leonard sees apology in them. It’s clear as crystal, just as it always is, and it’s not something he hasn’t seen before.

As much as it hurts to be in the receiver end every time, he doesn’t care if he has to keep seeing it over and over, not really, not if that means Jim will open his eyes again, will breathe and grin at him while Leonard searches for the rhythm of life in him.

&&&

Two days later, Jim is back on light duty. He’s still a bit pale, but his grin is firm in place and Leonard would be lying if he says he’s not glad of seeing him lovingly patting his chair and chatting animatedly with Sulu and Chekov.

Leonard’s presence on the bridge is something everyone is so used to no one seems to notice his compulsive need of having one point of contact with Jim at all times, his left hand pressed to the side of his neck to feel the pump in the major vessels there propelled by the beating of his heart.

It’s a reminder it’s working, a reminder that Jim is well now, a reminder and a reassurance he’s not quite ready to quit just yet and it might be ridiculous and time-consuming and he should get his sappy and still goddamn frightened ass back to Sickbay, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

He hasn’t let go of Jim ever since he found him in a pool of his own blood and he doesn’t plan to, not yet, probably not until he’s forced to.

The emergency that would help him to start the separation doesn’t come though. They go to one of the conference rooms instead to discuss ship management and Bones zones out of the conversation so fast he’s not sure that was even the topic of the meeting.

He feels ashamed for it, but Jim simply takes the hand Bones has been using to grip him under the table and squeezes it tight, readjusting Bones’ fingers around the wrist he’s been using as anchor.

Sky blue eyes smile at him, tell him it’s okay to wander off the conversation, that he’s not needed now.

When he finally comes back to Sickbay, Leonard displays Jim’s vitals on the monitors for what’s left of Alpha shift, lets the stable heartbeat resound in every bit of air in his office. It’s not enough for the echo of the previous silence to stop haunting him, but it’s something and it calms him down enough to work.

“Bones,” Jim breathes that night on his neck as Leonard holds him close enough to feel his heartbeat through the layers of skin, muscles and bones separating them, “I’m sorry.”

It’s soft, heartfelt and tender and every bit what he expected it to be when he saw it the first time shining in Jim’s eyes but it’s not soothing enough, not like the beating of his heart is against his own.

He takes it either way, thanks Jim with a kiss on his hairline and trying to smooth the anxiety in his breathing to allow him to sleep.

Jim traces his collarbone with lips closed and slightly damp before straightening up and looking right into his eyes and Leonard can hear it before it leaves his mouth—the promise he won’t ever be able to keep, the promise he’ll break the day he dies and abandons Leonard in the deep, ruthless black, the day he’ll take everything away from him to never come back and kiss it better as he always does.

But he doesn’t kiss Jim silent. He waits, braces himself for it, tells himself he has to listen to it because Jim won’t be lying, of course he won’t, Jim will believe it with every fiber of his being until reality crashes against his utter confidence in the universe and its justice and in his own ability to _make_ it just if it isn’t what he expects it to be, and Leonard can forgive him for being who he is, for being the man who fights continuously and unrepentantly against all odds.

He can, because that’s exactly the man he’s in love with.

He can, and he’ll miss him when Jim isn’t in his arms anymore, but for now, he can cope. He’ll fix him, fix _them_ until there’s nothing left but his own ragged, incomplete half to mend.

“What can I do?” is what Jim says instead of what he’s been waiting for. It’s he whom kisses Leonard breathless, he whom takes his right hand and kisses every knuckle as he scrambles to straddle his hips and press the same hand against his precordium, holding it firmly in place with his own, “Please, Bones. Let me help—let me—“

He’s impressed, that much he has to admit, if only to himself. Jim never ceases to amaze him, to tell him over and over he can expect many things from him but that he will always give him more and better instead. He’s already deciphered how much Leonard needs to feel the gentle _thump thump - thump thump - thump thump_ of his heart, how he can't get enough of it, not yet, not so soon after losing it, after almost losing Jim too.

He sits up, smiles against Jim’s plush lips, gives him enough kisses to make him understand he’s not tired of this, of them, enough and then a bit more to let him know he’ll never get tired of something that’s only theirs no matter how hard it is sometimes because he’s not fearless and bold as Jim but he’s strong and he’ll deal with it just fine.

He entwines his fingers with Jim’s right on top of his heart and kisses one cheekbone, caressing it with his breath later, “Just stay. Stay with me, Jim.”

_Stay_ , he doesn’t say, _stay right where you are for as long as you can and it’ll be enough._

Jim does more again, arranges his body in a perfect fit in Leonard’s lap and manages to embrace him too and leave a moist path of kisses from shoulder to neck and to jaw up to his lips, sealing it with an awed peck on them.

“I’m here,” he says, “You got me, Bones. You got me.”

And it’s not a promise, it’s an affirmation.


End file.
